Tonight I’ll watch Hillary Clinton accept the Democratic nomination for president. And while I watch, I’ll celebrate with some cookies, the Hillary chocolate chip cookies I baked this afternoon. I’ve been baking those cookies since 1992. They were (and are) my family’s favorites among all my cookie recipes. Hillary’s chocolate chip cookies went to school with my daughters, to the envy of their classmates. Sometimes they asked me to pack extra cookies for sharing. I mailed the cookies in care packages to college dorms. These cookies have gone to parties and potlucks and staff meetings. I’ve dropped off boxes of the cookies for telephone callers in the 2012 “Vote No” campaign for equal marriage rights and at the #JusticeforPhilando occupation this year. I’ll probably keep baking them forever. Continue reading
I plan to walk more in January, despite icy sidewalks. I plan to read more and have a stack of poetry and novels and nonfiction to tackle. I plan to write more, too — on a variety of topics, personal and political, local and global. That includes recycling contracts in St. Paul, Glendale public housing in Minneapolis, solar greenhouses and winter gardens across Minnesota, and bad bus stops in my neighborhood. 
Mary Turck